1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to a system and method for creating reusable management instrumentation for information technology. More particularly, the present invention relates to a system and method for combining generic access mechanisms with specific access paths to communicate with specific resources.
2. Description of the Related Art
Information technology (IT) resource management involves creating a model of the resource for use by a management tool to determine what properties a resource exposes to the management tool. The model is instrumented by providing code for each property in the model. The code allows a management tool to interact with the resource as described by the model. The instrumentation (i.e. provider) converts the raw interface provided by a resource into a form usable by a management tool.
Each property has a provider that includes information necessary to allow the management tool to interact with the property. A single provider may provide many properties. Typically, a provider works for a single class. In many cases, however, properties may require multiple providers based upon a desired operation, and providers may be combined into larger blocks of code that use a property name to determine a correct action.
Instrumentation is the mechanism a management tool uses to examine and manipulate a resource. Instrumentation may take many forms, such as standards-based access, resource proprietary application program interfaces (API's), and third party instrumentation. Standards-based access has properties stored in a repository that may be an industry standard or de-facto standard access protocol, such as Win32 registry, lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP), and Structured Query Language (SQL). Resource proprietary API's define, a proprietary API corresponding to a resource. Accessing management properties of a resource proprietary API often involves linking to libraries provided by the resource vendor and may involve information pre-processing for management tool compatibility. Third party instrumentation often adds value to a resource by creating additional instrumentation for a proprietary management interface. Third party instrumentation is often provided in an easily accessible form such as shell scripts.
In each of these cases, the instrumentation provides a bridge between management and manageability. A challenge found with existing art is maintaining independence of a management tool while supporting different types of interfaces.
Many attempts are made to standardize instrumentation interfaces. A challenge with existing attempts is that they place the burden of implementing a standard interface on the resource or they mix efforts of developing a standard instrumentation interface with efforts to develop a standard resource model.
What is needed, therefore, is a way to develop instrumentation which allows a management tool to manage a resource without alteration of either the management tool or the resource.